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How to Fail in Empire Without Really Trying (Or, What Did You Do in the Long War, Daddy?)

By The Editors

The
good news is, Paul Wolfowitz
is toast. The bad news is, George W. Bush will name
his successor. There is so much instruction, moral and otherwise, in this one
more disgraceful tale of what has become the most disgraceful—but also, unhappily,
disastrous and destructive—government in the history of American government
that one doesn’t know where to begin. In this case, we’ll move swiftly on from
the masterminds (such as they are, since the notion of “mind” in regard to the
current US administration is more rueful longing than realistic description) to
the accomplices—or, to put it in terms more amenable to current American
fashion (and flight from reality), the “codependents.”

Notice
the plural. There are many of them, a veritable planet’s worth (as befits the
major international development bank), but, once again, it is the Europeans
who’ve played the central role of spear-carriers to George Bush’s Nero. As with
so much else, the Wolfowitz burlesque acted out at
the World Bank (which wasted two years of the institution’s work) would never
have happened had the Europeans on the bank’s board of directors shown some—any—independence from the imperial
metropolis when the US president first nominated his then-deputy secretary of
defense to head the organization.

At
the time, it will be remembered, a profound institutional issue was exercising
many of the bank’s shareholders, those from the developing world in particular.
Why, these countries wanted to know, was the US continuing to exercise the sole
right to name the bank’s president? After all, a plausible, and defensible, privilege
granted in the final year of the Second World War, when both the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund were established at the Bretton
Woods conference, hardly seemed so in a radically changed political and
economic context six decades later. To point to the obvious, not only is the
world drastically different today from what it was in 1944 (especially in the
global distribution of actual economic weight),
but the US has also changed enormously (in every real sense, for the worse). In
fact, it takes considerable effort today even to imagine similarities in vision
and purpose between the administration of FDR, which sponsored Bretton Woods, and that of George W. Bush, which openly
proclaims its contempt for the very idea of international settlements in which
the US must, like every other nation, on occasion follow as well as lead.

Given
the preexisting discontent with the US monopoly on the World Bank’s presidency,
the consternation was palpable following Mr. Bush’s announcement of his nominee
in March 2005. Adding insult to injury does not begin to describe the clamor.
The headline in the Financial Times
(March 16, 2005) did not mince words: “Wolfowitz
nomination a shock for Europe.” The
most succinct comment on the Wolfowitz nomination was
made by Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prizewinning
economist, who knew something both about the World Bank and its mandate, having
served as its chief economist during the WTO Seattle protests: “The
World Bank will once again become a hate figure. This could bring street
protests and violence across the developing world.”

In
the event, neither protests nor violence ensued, in the developing world or
anywhere else. Nor did the World Bank become a figure of hate—at least, no more
so than it has been for the last few decades. The world as a whole, it seems,
was—once again and for the umpteenth time—willing to give the United States a
pass, and the benefit of the imperial doubt, willing to let it lead and see
where it aimed to take us, willing to sit down quietly and avoid rocking the
boat of “international consensus,” which
has proved so…consensual (the precise word is servile) to American wishes since
the end of the Cold War (and the onset of this new, successor crusade,
indeterminate in length, indefinable in purpose, impossibly—if
interminably—waged against an abstract noun, although its victims, by the tens
of thousands, are far from abstract).

One
of the oldest tropes in European politics is of American “naïveté” in
expectations of politicians and political reality. The truth is that the
gullibility of European politicians, and of their governments, vis-à-vis the
United States during the last quarter of a century has been spectacular—to such
an extent that it makes one wonder whether it is actually gullibility or, more
probably, a strategic surrender to US interests masquerading as (endlessly)
violated innocence. As European electorates (in “new” as well as “old” Europe)
are not as forbearing of US brutality in the world (and of the corresponding
mendacity about it) as are their governments, the latter, for that reason, now
constantly feign shock, shock, to learn of American actions after they’ve
occurred (and of American motives after they’ve been revealed). And so, once
again, the representatives of Europe’s governments presumably slumped into
their armchairs slack-jawed when George W. Bush proposed to transfer the
intellectual author of Operation Iraqi Freedom (and of the The Arabian Nights-like tale of Mesopotamian houris showering American
soldiers in rose petals and feeding them baqlawa) from DoD
to the World Bank in a bizarre, ideologically inverse, wannabe replay of the
famous migration decades earlier of Robert McNamara, confirming Marx’s observation
about history’s tendency to intellectual degradation the second time around. A
day after the Financial Times
headlined the “shock” to Europeans, however, The Wall Street Journal was editorializing a different point of
view altogether. “Banking on Wolfowitz,”
the newspaper titled its leader (March 17, 2005),
subtitling it, “And you thought Iraq was
difficult.” Clearly, according to the
house organ of unreconstructed neoconism,
the point to appointing Mr. Wolfowitz was precisely
to shock and awe the World Bank.

Mission
accomplished. And, once again, as ever with neoconism,
the imperial agenda was camouflaged in sermons of virtue in the delusion that
the natives abroad are as stupid as the empire’s own citizens back home, who
gave up caring a long time ago about who lives and dies in the various
expeditionary missions to civilize the barbarians as long as it isn’t them.
When serving directly under Mr. Bush at DoD,
Mr. Wolfowitz’s mantras were democracy and freedom,
and his cause the war against terror. At the World Bank, serving Mr. Bush
indirectly, the new mantras became “accountability” and “governance” and the
war to be fought was against the depredations of “corruption” (invariably of
the developing world, and of its brown, black, and yellow peoples, who must be
edified in the high moral regimen of the white men and women running the Enrons and Halliburtons and BPs and Shells and Exxon-Mobils
and stock exchanges and military-industrial complexes in New York, Washington,
London, Paris, and Berlin). It was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it; to
quote the Wall Street Journal again,
“…if anyone can stand up to the Robert Mugabes
of the world, it must be the man who stood up to Saddam Hussein.”

The
notion, of course, that Mr. Wolfowitz “stood up” to
Saddam Hussein, in a High Noon kind
of duel in the sun, would be laughable had it not become so tragic by now for
the Iraqi people. As for “the Robert Mugabes of the
world”—let alone Mugabe himself—it’s not at all
clear, to be polite about it, what Mr. Wolfowitz has
done, exactly, in the last two years to “stand up” to them. Then again, there are Journal
editors who remain convinced that we’ll find weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq one day. No retreat, no surrender. War is hell, whether against terrorism
or corruption.

Nevertheless,
even if you think that he’s performed a service to humanity despite all the
destruction and infamy he’s helped to visit upon the world and his own country,
you’d still think it was a bit rich for Mr. Wolfowitz
to be lecturing other people, and governments, on “accountability” when he
denounced the then-chief of staff of the US army, Gen. Eric Shinseki, for
making “outlandish” (in other words, correct)
assessments of the necessary US force strength in a “post-Saddam” (that is,
occupied) Iraq, and then helped to supervise the worst foreign-policy disaster
in the postwar history of the United States. (Yes, worse than Vietnam, as military strategists are increasingly
pointing out, since the latter tragedy never provoked the infinite number of
fronts against us the world over that this one has, and will.) Has Dr. Wolfowitz ever been brought to account—will he ever—for his
tenure at the defense department? Or, for that matter, for his hugely
unsuccessful couple of years at the World Bank, which have, quite literally,
paralyzed the institution from his first day in office? We know better. (We
don’t want to be accused of American naïveté.) Still, one would think that the
good professor, being such an expert on arms and the man, would understand the
advantages of discretion over bravado.

But
that is not the way of the neocons, who are nothing if not impermeable in their pride. What was it that that Bush adviser once told
journalist Ron Suskind? That Suskind
was part of “the reality-based community,” who believed that “solutions
emerge from [the] judicious study of discernible reality,” but that that was
“not the way the world really works anymore.” For Bushism,
that anonymous adviser explained, “discernible reality” was an illusion: “We’re
an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re
studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other
new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.
We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we
do.” (“Faith,
Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” Ron Suskind,
The New York Times Magazine,
October 17, 2004) This is breathtaking, mindless arrogance
(and positively bone-chilling in its neo-Hitlerism). It is also, quite
literally, lunatic nonsense.

It takes
a real emperor to understand the pitfalls of empire. There is no more succinct
description of Bushism’s imperial shipwreck(s) than
Napoleon’s famous diagnosis that, “The
great proof of madness is the disproportion of one’s designs to one’s means.”
As Corsica’s most glorious son essentially invented French patriotism (among
many other codes), he also understood the sheer artificiality of any notion of
“great” (let alone “indispensable”) nations. “A celebrated people,” he
warned, “lose dignity upon a closer view.”

Fortunately, for the
world, reality does exist, and, for quite a while now, it has been laying Bushism, and the Bushists, lower
and lower each day, as it’s been stripping the dignity of the celebrated people
who have allowed themselves to be led by such men and
women. Last month, The Economist
dedicated a column to neoconism’s walking wounded. It
titled its analysis, “Sidelined by reality” (April 19). The problem, the
magazine stated, “can be
traced back not just to flawed execution but to flawed
thinking.” Well, yes, obviously.

Take Mr. Wolfowitz, for example. It has been argued that, despite
his actions at DoD, he cares
profoundly about fighting corruption in the developing world and, therefore, of
alleviating poverty. Such an argument was made earlier this month—by an
African, no less—in the op-ed pages of The
New York Times. The article by Nuhu Ribadu, datelined Abuja, Nigeria, and entitled, “Why Wolfowitz Should Stay” (May 1), argued that, “Mr. Wolfowitz’s presidency…has been largely defined by his
energetic support for a new Africa that is struggling to emerge.” It went on to
aver that:

Over
the last two years, Mr. Wolfowitz has effectively
directed the bank’s energies toward
fighting poverty and improving human life. He is a champion of
using international development institutions to deal with some of the world’s
major problems. And he has been a steadfast supporter
of the efforts of African organizations to rescue our people
from the scourge of misrule, which leads to poverty, disease and
early death.

No one at greekworks.com is an expert on Africa,
let alone Nigeria. Just a passing glance at the Times’s foreign-news pages,
however, offers enough information for a very different perspective. We don’t
know if Mr. Wolfowitz is “a champion of using
international development institutions to deal with some of the world’s major
problems.” What we do know are two salient facts: one, broadly biographical,
the other, specifically programmatic. First, for the
biography.

Mr. Wolfowitz’s
dissertation (in political science) on desalination projects in the Middle
East was actually about nuclear proliferation in the region.

In 1972, newly minted Dr. Wolfowitz went to work at the Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency (ACDA).

Five years later, Jimmy Carter
appointed Mr. Wolfowitz deputy assistant
secretary of defense (the first and last time Mr. Wolfowitz
would work for a Democratic administration, although he remains a
registered Democrat to this day).

In 1982, Mr. Wolfowitz
was appointed director of policy planning at the state department.

Two years later, he became assistant
secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs.

In 1986, he was appointed ambassador
to Indonesia.

In 1989, he became undersecretary of
defense for policy.

In 1993, after Bill Clinton took over
the White House, Dr. Wolfowitz temporarily
retired to private life after over two decades in government as dean of
the Nitze School of International Studies at
Johns Hopkins.

After George W. Bush’s election, he
was appointed deputy secretary of defense.

As one can see by this
brief biographical outline, Dr. Wolfowitz’s entire
life has been spent on military and security issues. He is not an economist,
and has never run a business. With the exception of his stint as ambassador to
Indonesia, he has never had anything to do with—and would be the first to admit
that he has neither basic nor extensive experience in—development issues. As
such, being named head of the World Bank was, one would think, a professional
bridge too far. Robert McNamara, at least, was an economist who had once been
the youngest assistant professor at Harvard Business School and a famously
successful president of the Ford Motor Company (the first outside the Ford
family to hold that position) when LBJ named to him to head the Bank. Mr. Wolfowitz’s immediate predecessor, James Wolfensohn, was an investment banker with a degree, again,
from Harvard Business School who had worked on three continents before going to
the Bank. (As an Australian who was a naturalized American citizen when Bill
Clinton appointed him, he also had a decidedly international view of the
world.) It is an indication of the contempt with which the current US president
faces most global issues (with the obvious exception of “terrorism”)—from
climate change to the consequences of globalization to, yes, development in the
developing countries—that he named such an evidently unqualified person to such
an unquestionably important post.

It is hardly a
coincidence, then, that, upon taking up his new position, Mr. Wolfowitz did not direct the World Bank’s “energies toward
fighting poverty and improving human life,” but, rather, toward fighting
“corruption” in the developing world—or, to use Mr. Ribadu’s
formulation, toward “rescuing” people “from the scourge of misrule, which leads
to poverty, disease and early death.”

First things first: the
“scourge of misrule” is an innately slippery phrase. What does it describe,
exactly? Robert Mugabe? Saddam Hussein? The Saudi state? Or, perhaps, the US
occupation of Iraq? Or Afghanistan’s present
“democratic” regime? Or, even more to the point, municipal government in
New Orleans? In any case, the jury is out as to whether the “scourge of
misrule” actually leads to poverty, let alone to disease and early death. It might lead to such; it often does lead to such; it will ultimately
lead to such, but, ultimately, to echo Keynes, we’re all dead anyway. The truth
is that the links between “misrule” and poverty are complex and, occasionally,
even benign.

There is not an American
historian who does not know that Tammany Hall, while stupendously corrupt, also
made it possible for many of the huddled immigrant masses that ended up on New
York City’s teeming shores not only to survive, but also to secure a government
job and, thus, some sort of future for their (extended) kith and kin. The Irish
cops and Italian sanitation men and Jewish teachers and Greek diner-owners
(and, decades later, black bus drivers) who became the backbone of New York’s
lower middle class would have taken a lot longer to do so had it not been for Gotham’s notorious “misrule.” Every sociologist knows that
political corruption is simultaneously a political morass and a social network.
That is why the repressive (Ba’athist idealists would
say distorting) violence aside, the Ba’ath party
under Saddam Hussein essentially functioned the same way as Tammany’s Democrats
did—or as the Republican party did under Ulysses S. Grant during the Gilded
Age. It is also why “good government” and “reform” movements are so often led
by upper-middle, professional, and upper classes, as the depredations of “corruption”
are perceived to be the work of benighted plebeians.

Funny, though, how those
plebeians see things radically differently. We have no
doubt, for example, that the more Hugo Chávez extends
his Bolivarian revolution throughout Venezuelan society, the more corrupt that
revolution becomes. We also have no doubt that there is, in fact, something
authentically democratic about this effort, and that to extend the principles
of democracy into social life, as Mr. Chávez is
doing, requires a redefinition of “good governance.” Mr. Chávez
is clearly not only a popular leader, but also one who has not been afraid to
test his popularity fairly at the
polls. While the US, and the World Bank and IMF—from which institutions Mr. Chávez recently and conspicuously withdrew his
country—might abhor him, the manifest majority of his fellow citizens have
repeatedly elected him to lead them. (The Western mediacracy
habitually transmogrifies popularity into “populism” when the popularity in
question threatens Western interests.) Thus, to the choice posed by so many
fastidious NGO types in the West—corruption with Chávez
or “good governance” without him—most Venezuelans would not hesitate to opt for
the former. Actually, they would not hesitate to laugh out loud. Good governance,
they would respond in disbelief? In Venezuela, before Hugo Chávez? Excuse us, señor(a), but you obviously don’t know
anything about our country.

Or, we would add, about
any country. Why did Lula win reelection in Brazil with the same 61 percent of
the vote (minus a few tenths of a point) that he received in his original
election, although his entire administration was mired in a vast corruption
scandal the second time around? Or, to take a completely different example, in
a different socioeconomic context, why has Vladimir Putin
been so consistently popular in Russia although he has conspicuously (and with
authoritarian sang-froid) flouted all
the “rules” of “free-market” governance and Anglo-Saxon notions of capital(ist) order? The answer is
the same in both cases (although for very different reasons), and would have
been the same answer given by a Tammany wardheeler on
the Lower East Side decades ago: the great mass of laboring people believe that
economic democracy is impossible without some form of “corruption”—i.e., social
intervention—in the (re)distribution
of economic goods and services. (Greeks know all about the efficient
redistributive social effects of partisan corruption from the recent two and
half decades of rule under PASOK, which created unprecedented wealth—much of it
linked to government contracts or “access”—for that notoriously indefinable,
and therefore expansive, class of the mikro-mesaioi.)

What really sticks in
the craw of Mr. Wolfowitz’s critics is that this is
the man whose department of defense handed the US armed forces to Halliburton.
This is also the man under whose “management” Iraq itself was handed over to
systematic pillage. On May 12, the lead story on the front page of The New York Times read, “Billions in
Oil Missing in Iraq, U.S. Study Says.” It began:

Between
100,000 and 300,000 barrels a day of Iraq’s oil production over the past
four years is unaccounted for and could have been
siphoned off through corruption or smuggling,
according to a draft American government report.

Using
an average of $50 a barrel, the report said the discrepancy was valued at $5
million to $15 million daily.

That’s roughly $1.8 to
$5.5 billion per annum, or about $7 to $22 billion in the
four years of the US occupation. Quite a swag. Of
course, in an age-old Western tradition of ceremonial hand-washing that goes
back to Pontius Pilate, the criminal appropriation of all this wealth is blamed
squarely on—who else?—the occupied, not the occupiers. The report was prepared
by the US Government Accountability Office and completely whitewashes US
responsibility for this “misrule”—although, according to the Times, it does point a finger at
(surprise, surprise)“smaller refineries not controlled by large
Western companies in places like China, the Caribbean and even small European
countries.” It’s the fault of the Chinese again, or of the Jamaicans, or of
those perennially perfidious Europeans—but not of “large
Western” oil companies because, of course, we all know how deeply moral and
steeped in profound traditions of corporate integrity and social responsibility
these companies are.

The Times article ends as follows:

[T]he lack of modern metering
equipment...at Iraq’s wellheads made it especially difficult
to track smuggling there. [A] State Department official
agreed that there were no meters at the wellheads,
but said that Iraq’s Oil Ministry
had signed a contract with Shell Oil to study the possibility of putting in the
meters.

The
official added that an American-financed project to install meters on Iraq’s main oil
platform in the Persian Gulf
was scheduled to be completed this month.

As
sizable as a discrepancy of as much as 300,000 barrels a day would be in most parts of
the world, some analysts said it could be expected in a
country with such a long, ingrained history of corruption.

“It would be surprising if it was not the
case,” said John Pike,
director of GlobalSecurity.org, which closely follows security and economic issues in Iraq.
He added, “How could the oil sector be the
exception?”

How, indeed? After all,
theft is “ingrained” in these semi-barbaric people. Allah be praised that Shell
Oil will put everything right. (We just hope it doesn’t lead to the same
results as in Mr. Ribadu’s native Nigeria, where the
Goldman Environmental Prizewinning journalist and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged by the country’s military junta for
his unceasing opposition to the environmental destruction of the Ogoni people’s homelands in the Niger Delta by, yes, Shell
Oil.)

After reading this
reportage—shameless both in its racism and in its exoneration of the US (and,
more generally, the West) for destroying not only Iraq’s economic viability and
social coherence, but its national unity—one understands why “they” hate “us”
with a purple passion. Meanwhile, in the ether regions of unimpeachable Western
morality and integrity, the head of the World Bank cooks up sweetheart deals
for his…sweetheart, hires old cronies at will, hems and haws, denies and
recants, threatens and conciliates, fulminates and abnegates, vows holy war and
everlasting love, claims to be the victim of conspiracies and cabals one
minute, and merely misquoted the next, while billions of people in the
developing world are continually maligned for their “ingrained” corruption.

Two last points. Nuhu Ribadu is chairman of
Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission—an appointed position. He
was appointed by President Olusegun Obasanjo, who was also responsible for the recent elections
in Nigeria, condemned by the EU, in the words of the head of its monitoring
team, for “ballot box stuffing, alteration of official
result forms, stealing of sensitive polling materials, vote buying and underage
voting” (BBC, April 23). The head of the Transition Monitoring Group,
the Nigerian citizens’ organization monitoring the polls, called the election a
“charade.” Under the circumstances, Mr. Ribadu’s
praise of Mr. Wolfowitz provokes many more questions
than it answers.

Finally, this whole
debacle might have had a constructive, and profoundly renovative,
ending if, following Mr. Wolfowitz’s inevitable
resignation from his position, the European members of the World Bank insisted
that the US finally give up its right to name the institution’s head, just as
they would, in turn, surrender their right to name the head of the IMF. But
that did not happen, of course. Essentially because the Europeans, in the end,
are as dishonest about their commitment to global democratic governance as the
US is. Naturally, all this hypocrisy and patent self-aggrandizement is obvious
to the entire world—which is why Hugo Chávez is
laughing all the way to his own, newly founded development bank.